Sandstorm

6:16 P.M.

CASSANDRA KNEWtrue terror for the first time in ages. The last time she had felt this gut-level fear was as a child, listening to her father’s footsteps outside her bedroom door at midnight. This was the same. A fear that gelled the insides and turned bone marrow to ice. Breathing was a talent forgotten.

She cowered inside a tiny glass building, more a chapel, enough for one person to kneel. Its only entrance was a short door that had to be ducked into. No windows. Past the door, the lower city spread below her.

She watched the continual arcing bolts of discharge. Some struck the lake, grew more intense, then sucked back to the roof, brighter for the effort, as if the storm above were feeding off the waters below.

The same was not true when it struck the glass. Every surface absorbed the strange energy, becoming a liquid pool, but only as briefly as a lightning flicker. Then it turned solid again.

She had watched one of her men succumb to such a bolt. He had been sheltering behind a wall, leaning on it. Then the bolt struck the wall. He fell through it, his support suddenly gone. The wall solidified again. Half his body on one side, the other half on this side. Between, he had been burned to bone. Even his clothes had caught fire, a human torch, on two sides of glass.

All across the city, the fighting had stopped. Men sought shelter.

They had seen the mummified bodies. They knew what was happening.

The cavern had gone deathly quiet, accept for the occasional gunshot by the back wall, where the enemy had sequestered itself in some passageway. Anyone who approached was shot.

Cassanda clutched her electronic tracker. She watched the spread of red triangles. Her men. Or those few that were left. She counted. Of the fifty on the assault team, only a dozen were left. She watched as another blinked out. A shattering scream fluttered through the city.

Death stalked her men.

She knew even such enclosed shelters were not safe. She had seen the mummified bodies within a few of the homes.

The key seemed to be movement. Perhaps the amount of static in the room was such that any stirrings attracted a bolt to stab out at it.

So Cassandra sat still, very still. She had done the same in her childhood bed. It hadn’t helped then. She doubted it would now. She was trapped.